Writing Update 2/25/26 - One Month In
Feb. 25th, 2026 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
masterghandalfWell, for anyone who’s still interested in these posts, today seemed an appropriate day to go ahead and share some more on my current WIP! Why today? I committed to knuckling down and getting to work on this project in earnest with my current draft on Tuesday, January 27th of this year, which means that as of today, I’ve been working on it for exactly thirty days – roughly one month, or the equivalent of a NaNoWriMo session! And, thus far, I’ve successfully stuck to my overall goal of writing between 500-1000 words per day, every day (many days I’ve actually gone over); I’m currently at 38,418 words total (across seven full chapters, a prologue, and an interlude). So, while I’ve not hit the traditional NaNo goal in this time period (that was 50,000 words, for a reminder) I think I’ve definitely made some very respectable progress!
I think one of my biggest weaknesses as a fiction writer is my tendency to overthink and over-critique myself. I have a real tendency to drag my feet and not start my actual writing until I’ve mulled an idea over in my head enough to convince myself it’s as perfect as I can make it – and since that’s a moving target, it can sadly set me on a spiral where nothing actually gets written. Setting my daily goal for myself lets me get over that hump, by shifting the focus to producing something rather than aiming for perfection. After all, I can tell myself I can always go back and revise later. Right now, my goal is just to produce a complete rough draft of my novel, and see what develops from there.
So, with all that out of the way, what is my current WIP, you may ask? Well, a few months ago I posted about some of the story ideas I’d been mulling in my head for a while. This is one of them, specifically the first one; I’ll go ahead and repost the brief summary here for reference:
I. This is probably the most developed of the concepts I have. Epic fantasy novel (intended to come out at circa 150,000 to 200,000 words) set in a renaissance Italy inspired city-state, following a young noblewoman who gets caught up in an elaborate plot involving strange magic, cutthroat politics and her own family’s secrets coming to light, as she finds herself fallen from grace and forced to navigate the city’s dark underbelly, and ultimately to defeat her enemies and stop a tyrant from gaining power – and maybe wrestle with some difficult questions about herself and who she is along the way. Lots of action, intrigue, magic, magical transformations and questions of identity, some unlikely friendships and a touch of romance, and my own take the idea of D&D style tieflings. I envision this story as being largely self-contained, but with opportunities for sequels, and it’s set in a world I’ve been slowly building in the back of my mind as a sort of broad setting where I could play with different kinds of stories in different fantasy subgenres – I’ve also written some scraps of Elric of Melnibone-esque sword and sorcery stories in a different part of the same world, and have even vaguer ideas for a more classic high fantasy saga in yet another part of it.
If I had to do an elevator pitch for this one comparing it to existing series by other writers, I might go with something like “Mistborn meets Brimstone Angels.” Title-wise, I’m currently calling this Crimson Shadows, though I don’t much like it and expect to change it (for one, The Crimson Shadow is already the title of one of RA Salvatore’s non-Forgotten Realms series, and I’d rather avoid the comparison since that story is quite different). In any event, I’m feeling pretty good about what I’ve written for it so far and feel like I’m making good progress – like I said in the initial overview, I’m aiming for something in the vicinity of 150,000 to 200,000 words, maybe comparable in length to something like Dune or Warbreaker if those comparisons mean anything to you. Based on my outline and how much I’ve written so far and where I currently am in the story, that seems quite doable, especially if I can maintain my current pace over the next couple of months. If anyone reading this is curious about anything else about this project, feel free to ask!
And before I go, I do have one more thing I’d like to share; I’ve been playing around with designs for a couple of my main protagonists over the last couple of days, and so by the power of HeroForge™, say hello to Thea and Lys!
I think one of my biggest weaknesses as a fiction writer is my tendency to overthink and over-critique myself. I have a real tendency to drag my feet and not start my actual writing until I’ve mulled an idea over in my head enough to convince myself it’s as perfect as I can make it – and since that’s a moving target, it can sadly set me on a spiral where nothing actually gets written. Setting my daily goal for myself lets me get over that hump, by shifting the focus to producing something rather than aiming for perfection. After all, I can tell myself I can always go back and revise later. Right now, my goal is just to produce a complete rough draft of my novel, and see what develops from there.
So, with all that out of the way, what is my current WIP, you may ask? Well, a few months ago I posted about some of the story ideas I’d been mulling in my head for a while. This is one of them, specifically the first one; I’ll go ahead and repost the brief summary here for reference:
I. This is probably the most developed of the concepts I have. Epic fantasy novel (intended to come out at circa 150,000 to 200,000 words) set in a renaissance Italy inspired city-state, following a young noblewoman who gets caught up in an elaborate plot involving strange magic, cutthroat politics and her own family’s secrets coming to light, as she finds herself fallen from grace and forced to navigate the city’s dark underbelly, and ultimately to defeat her enemies and stop a tyrant from gaining power – and maybe wrestle with some difficult questions about herself and who she is along the way. Lots of action, intrigue, magic, magical transformations and questions of identity, some unlikely friendships and a touch of romance, and my own take the idea of D&D style tieflings. I envision this story as being largely self-contained, but with opportunities for sequels, and it’s set in a world I’ve been slowly building in the back of my mind as a sort of broad setting where I could play with different kinds of stories in different fantasy subgenres – I’ve also written some scraps of Elric of Melnibone-esque sword and sorcery stories in a different part of the same world, and have even vaguer ideas for a more classic high fantasy saga in yet another part of it.
If I had to do an elevator pitch for this one comparing it to existing series by other writers, I might go with something like “Mistborn meets Brimstone Angels.” Title-wise, I’m currently calling this Crimson Shadows, though I don’t much like it and expect to change it (for one, The Crimson Shadow is already the title of one of RA Salvatore’s non-Forgotten Realms series, and I’d rather avoid the comparison since that story is quite different). In any event, I’m feeling pretty good about what I’ve written for it so far and feel like I’m making good progress – like I said in the initial overview, I’m aiming for something in the vicinity of 150,000 to 200,000 words, maybe comparable in length to something like Dune or Warbreaker if those comparisons mean anything to you. Based on my outline and how much I’ve written so far and where I currently am in the story, that seems quite doable, especially if I can maintain my current pace over the next couple of months. If anyone reading this is curious about anything else about this project, feel free to ask!
And before I go, I do have one more thing I’d like to share; I’ve been playing around with designs for a couple of my main protagonists over the last couple of days, and so by the power of HeroForge™, say hello to Thea and Lys!
